Invest in Offboarding

As internship season wraps up, it’s important to offboard your interns properly to round off their experience on the right foot. A simple way to do this is with personal exit interviews. Vital to cultivating a healthy internship program, exit interviews make it easy to connect with your interns one last time and collect candid feedback before they return to school.

On their last day, sit down with your interns one-on-one and talk about their experience. Ask them engaging questions and generate conversation about specific topics you’d like feedback on, such as their summer project or their day-to-day workload. This provides valuable insight into the areas of their program that were successful, as well as the other areas that need improvement. If you don’t think you’ll get the most candid feedback face to face, send an additional evaluation survey a few weeks after the internship ends. Your interns will have more time to think about their overall experience, and the anonymous format might inspire them to provide more constructive criticism than they did in person.

Host a Campus Recruiting Event

Eighty-four percent of companies in Europe and North America report the events they participate most in are university career fairs. Leverage your intern’s connection with their college or university to host a recruitment event as an additional way to stay in touch with your intern. Then, ask your intern to attend and spread the word. Chances are, they’ll come with more top-talent in tow.

Although recruitment events might seem daunting, candidate relationship management (CRM) technology like iCIMS Connect can minimize the stresses associated with campus event planning and execution. Connect’s recruitment marketing tools make it easy to engage students before the event to drive attendance. Then, event-specific features, like recruiter review and candidate kiosk give recruiters the tools they need to expedite event check-in, meet with students, and record their information. This allows them to successfully head back to the office with a batch of next-generation job seekers ready to be recruited.

Stay Connected with Email and Social Media

The easiest way to stay in touch with your summer intern? Email marketing and social media. If your intern had a positive experience working for your company, consider recruiting them for a full-time position when the time is right. Email marketing campaigns are an easy way to stay connected and keep them up-to-date with the latest company news and job openings. A strong management CRM tool, like iCIMS Connect, lets recruiters share personalized corporate updates with their candidate pools. So, when your intern graduates and enters the job market, he or she will know of the available job openings at your company.

You can also encourage your interns to follow your brand on social media before they head out. Eighty-six percent of working people in their first decade of employment will use social media in their job hunt, so use your company pages as career sites. A powerful applicant tracking system (ATS) like iCIMS Recruit allows recruiters to post open requisitions to corporate social pages. Once your intern follows your company, they’ll stay up-to-date with the latest company job openings, and can apply directly from their social media profile when graduation rolls around.